To make money with SHOUTcast you need to trigger a pair of two-minute stopsets each hour in your programming for the built-in commercials to play. This provides the revenue that your station will receive! If you have additional stopsets within your programming, that is fine, you can trigger up to 5 commercial breaks an hour. The only limit is that you have to leave 5 minutes between one break and the next one.

To activate each stopset of ads, all you need to do is play a 2:00 minute MP3 file with the tag "Advert:" in the artist and title. Note that the audio in this MP3 file will be heard by folks in countries that don't have ads running. However the audio from the MP3 will be covered by ads in the US, several European countries - anywhere your station is being monetized. What that means is that you should include audio in the file (or files) that you want people to hear if they're not hearing ads during those 2 minutes. You can make the MP3 any way you want, but the ID3 tags will have to be correct to fire the ads and generate your revenue.

When the metatada from the two-minute file is sent to the SHOUTcast server from your encoder, the ad insertion technology injects a unique set of two minutes of targeted ads for each of your listeners. That's right, listeners hear different ads depending on where they are located, even though they are all listening to your station. This is called server-side geo-targeted advertising. And the SHOUTcast server does all the work for you. You don't have to download any spots, or send any reports. The ads are ready to go. All you have to do is play the trigger file, and your listeners in monetized countries will hear the ads.

The metadata to activate the ads is "Advert:" (without the quotes) in both the Artist AND Title song fields.Note that the advertising server is case sensitive, so make sure to use a capital “A” and the colon at the end!

A sample advert mp3 file is attached to this post.
Note how the length is 120 seconds (2:00) and both the Title and Artist tags say Advert:

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Troubleshooting

The latest SHOUTcast DNAS includes additional icons to help you troubleshoot the ad insertion:

single dollar = pending first advert play (listener matches to an advert group)
multi-dollar = adverts have been successfully played
blocked dollar = no matching adverts to the listener group
PSA+speaker = PSAs have / will be played
no icon = no listener advert group so adverts will not be provided

NOTE: there's a tooltip (mouseover) for each icon which gives the state and group id and also the number of advert plays as needed.